This weekend was quite unique. I had the opportunity of being a part of two very different cultural and gastronomic events. Friday evening was spent at J's place. She and her landlady (also her roommate) invited me over for a 'shabbat' meal. In Judaism, shabbat is the seventh day of the Jewish week and is a day of rest wherein the family congregates together eating three special meals. Also, it is a time when the Jewish community contemplate the spiritual aspect of lie often atoning for mistakes made over the year. J is one of the most wonderful and extremely intelligent women I have met and I doubt I will meet more like her. Sometimes you meet women who are so effervescent, charismatic, funny, caring and the easiest to get along with and you almost wonder why you can't just have a guy version of her :P I know two women I would very much like to meet. More on that later. Anyways, going back to the shabbat meal, we had squash soup, cauliflower gratin, a salad with roman lettuce, tomatoes, blue cheese and balsamic vinegar (I'm hooked on to this thing) and khallah, the traditional bread which J baked herself. Knowing J, she always sets herself apart in some way so she baked the bread in a way that the inside was semi gooey...really nice :). There were 6 of us and we sat around the table, lit up with the candles (which are supposed to burn all night) rounded up with rosemary liek laurels resting around those candlestands. J and her roomie then took the candles to her forehead and what they sang next, rather the way they sang their prayers gave me goosebumps:
"Baruch ata adonai
Eloheinu melech ha'olam
Hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz"
That was just one part of the bread blessing....I think :)
Here's what it means and it's beautiful in its simplicity:
"Blessed are you O lord our God
King of the Universe
For giving us bread from the earth"
And we held the bread together and broke it after saying one more prayer (garrrh I should have taken a camera) and we blessed our wine and drunk it :)
So much conversation ensued I don't even remember the details. We spoke about our eccentricities as children and our parents and how much we love them. I asked about the NRA because H has a pistol at home and that just made me feel a bit queasy. It was interesting to listen to H's explanation about essentially "having the ability to protect oneself from one;s government if turned tyrannical. What would we socialists do?!!!!" hmmmmm
C spoke about different things, how he wants to have kids someday (that's the first American guy in my peer group I've heard wanting to settle down) and then trailed off for a bit ending on an ex girlfriend in Brooklyn and why it didn't work although she was great.......'the distance' he said and left me to pour some more wine and sink into mellowness. C was a journalist for the US millitary for 5 years before having to resign because of epileptic fits. He is the funniest I've met on campus so far and extremely talented. Hoping to cast him as John for the short film that my team directs this semester. Dropping me off he said "Well we all have the same concerns Ronnie regardless of which country we are in...we'll talk about this over more wine?" I smiled and agreed trying to hide my sadness about what he earlier said about distances by looking out of the window. Finally getting out, C called out to me just as i was walking away. He had his classic Woody Allen-ish horn-rimmed mega spectacles half-way down on his nose (which his colleagues apparently dubbed as the birth-control glass because it would never get him laid) and said 'hay hay' in the very goofy naughty way. These are my friends and I am grateful for always finding the most unique lot of them wherever I go.
Today, I was couped up in my room all day long, having 'Ramen' noodles for dinner and tring my very best to finish my auto-ethnography assignment in between fooling around my blogpost's weird kitschy purple new template. I had decided not to attend an Indian get together down the street "There will be a DJ!" read the facebook invite. And just generally shaking off clammy mellowness I tried focussing on my screen. Qi-bi called me out to the dining space and the table was laid out with a grill and fancy food. turns out today is the chinese Moon Festival, and it's marked by the family gathering together to eat a good meal. So I sat there with 5 Chinese students (Qi and Janey are from NYC) trying to understand the relevance of this festival, what the meat was marinated in, making jokes about how hopeless I was with chopsticks and nibbling away at the fantastic beef, tofu, chicken and prawns. Turns out American kids learn about Hindu gods in their curriculum. Janey was telling me more about Shiva than I knew! 2 hours later and a lot of meat and prawns down, Qi brought out 'ice wine' and we were all quizzed. I also had chinese 'moon cakes' and they were splendid. These are made from thick lotus seed paste that's surrounded by a relatively thinner layer and the centre of the cake is salted yolk from duck eggs.
Food for thought followed. Janey asked me and Qi whether we would date men who were shorter than us or younger. I said I could settle for someone slightly younger and Tink her friend did his best to convince me that "you should never date a guy who is younger to you because he will be emotionally stunted" ....hmmmm. The guys said they would not mind dating women who were taller to them :D That's a refreshing one. Wonder what they would have to say about older women ;)
Syracuse is getting colder after getting intermittently warm and damp. And I can feel the weather affecting my chain of thoughts. I feel it when I wake up in my bed and see the grey sky outside, I feel it when I go to my cold bed alone everynight, I feel it when I walk to school letting the draft make me shiver taking off my cap so I get used to this and I feel it when it rains and I can hear the cars 'ssssssshhhh' through the wet roads beneath my window. Coming to the US has definitely been more than what I expected from my campus life....even if the last month has been an unexpected low....there are just 8 months left to my academic life and I can only hope I'll do justice to all those 32 weeks..........only 32 weeks
